L2TP server keepalive-timeout

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

OK I give up. I’ll learn the handshake, wear the silly hat, sacrifice my first-born beneath the first full moon after the Spring equinox and do whatever is necessary to gain access to the secrets of RouterOS:

Such as how do you set a keepalive-timeout in an L2TP server?

According to the RouterOS manual:

“keepalive-timeout (time; default: 30) - defines the time period (in seconds) after which the router is starting to send keepalive packets every second. If no traffic and no keepalive responses has came for that period of time (i.e. 2 * keepalive-timeout), not responding client is proclaimed disconnected.”

However I have been utterly unable to find any reference to a keepalive-timeout setting in the configuration of my running L2TP server, let alone been able to configure a timeout.

2

http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/l2tp-keep-alive-where-is-it/40824/1

According to that you can’t.

3

Ah. Should have searched ‘keep alive’ rather than ‘keepalive’.

So I’ve banged my head against this one unsuccessfully before, and still need a way to stop ‘Sessions’ in User Manager getting totally out of control.

Using Watchdog timer to keep VPN tunnels open and/or close them as suggested is clumsy and unsatisfactory - if the server or any link to it goes down every CPE on the system is going to be rebooting every minute until it comes up again. I suppose a script to ping the server every 5 minutes with the server having a 10 minute idle timeout would do the trick but it’s a poor reflection on MT when customers have to find work-arounds for its shortcomings.